How Mindfulness helped me get my groove back after Burnout – Part 3

Unfortunately not happily stuffing myself with nuts and seeds.Image by James Barker at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

So there I am, sitting in front of the counsellor, feeling slightly ridiculous and, let’s face it, coughing like several members of the Bronte family at once. It was one of those coughs where people would markedly walk around me in supermarkets, and would surreptitiously get the antiseptic hand gel out when they thought i wasn’t looking. However, on the upside, people did tend to give me a lot of personal space.

(I’d have added an image here but everything was far too disturbing).

So why did I feel ridiculous? In my messed up world view, I’d somehow failed. Firstly because I’d been in therapy before and I had been unable to stop a crisis occurring again, secondly because I still had the feeling that I was letting everyone down and thirdly, because frankly, the antidepressants still had me quite baked so the infection, the drugs and the general messed-up-ness led to everything feeling slightly surreal.

As you do, I talked and he listened. I explained that In that one of things that had kept me going so long was the fact that I didn’t feel all that depressed (apart from one very intense day-long dose of the blues in the summer) and it was the physical stuff that I was more concerned about. I explained about the workload, and how I’d mistaken obsessiveness for tenacity, and buried lots of myself in the process. It was then that he asked me a very simple, but very pointed question.

So how wedded to the hamster wheel are you?

This stopped me dead in my tracks.

After a certain amount of coaxing, I realised my marriage to the hamster wheel was total and all-consuming. I had taken it all on and not let anything back out. I had put myself last, and got caught up in the cult of busy, endlessly thinking and planning about things to change at work, things to change at home, worrying about neglecting everyone but never having the energy to do anything about it until it gained a momentum all of its own.

In her recent book “Sane New World” Ruby Wax uses a description of being on autopilot when she hosted a dinner party, didn’t drink but still couldn’t remember anything about it because the clatter of her own thought processes had driven her through it without her being able to retain any of it. I had been like that for months, possibly years.

Which is where mindfulness came into the conversation.

Mindfulness, for the uninitiated, does not have to wear tie-die and smell of patchouli, the universe does not need to hold you in its loving embrace and doesn’t even involve getting your kit off in a field, though if you feel the urge, I’ll encourage you to do whatever feels right for you as long as it makes you happy. (And in some instances, as long as I don’t have to watch whatever it is that makes you happy – i.e. I find drum solos catastrophically dull – I’m a happy bunny too).

My counsellor said, if you think you’re too busy for a ten minute mindfulness meditation, you should probably try at least half an hour and we went through a short meditation. It wasn’t like I was a complete stranger to meditation as I’d had a rather excellent yoga teacher back in the day, and I had used it to get to sleep when Smalls was small and I was anxious. And because I was off work, and spending an inordinate amount of time in bed, I started to build a practice into my life.

I think with burnout, you have to realise that this is a true life changer, and so it’s proved. I still do a lot of sleeping, and to be honest, I’m still not 100% percent, but I hope I am now a more optimistic, more creative and more honest version of the person I was before. And that’s down to Mindfulness. It’s a tool. It doesn’t suit everyone. But it works for me. And it’s one of those habit changes that I’ve managed to stick with for the long haul.

3 thoughts on “How Mindfulness helped me get my groove back after Burnout – Part 3”

Thank you.
Thank you for writing this – I now feel less ridiculous, knowing there is someone else who feels the same as me. I have recently realised (after several years) that I never switch off. I never stop, and I am also burning out. I don’t feel depressed, but I do feel anxious, to some degree, a lot o the time. I am having a trial mindfulness session next week, and I am hoping for great things.
You are very brave to share your story, and I hope mindfulness continues to help you through the long haul x